Millions of Apple Safari users in Britain have been given the green light to sue Google amidst proven allegations that the search giant implemented a workaround to bypass Safari security and install tracking cookies on both desktop and iOS versions of Apple’s web browser.

Why? Because over 90% of Google’s ad revenue comes from advertising and they wanted to deliver higher-cost targeted advertising to OS X and iOS users.

New research from Palo Alto Networks has brought to light a terrifying vulnerability in Android that could be used for secretly installing malware apps on a device on almost 50% of existing devices, Business Insider reports.

Google Maps for Android and Google Maps for the iPhone may never have true feature parity. This is due in part to the limitations Apple puts in place on third-party application developers, but Google also seems to reserve some features and design elements solely for users of its own mobile platform.

One such feature was just added to Google Maps on Wednesday evening, and iPhone users should definitely be jealous. More →

Google’s driverless cars will definitely make driving safer for people inside cars, but what about pedestrians? Quartz reports that Google has been awarded a patent that details a system for installing airbags on the outside of vehicles to lessen the chances that someone getting struck with a self-driving Google car will suffer severe or fatal injuries. More →

One of the best built-in features of Android 5.0Lollipop focuses on security and privacy, even though it comes with one unwelcome side effect: a hit to overall performance. However, in its most recent Lollipop update, Google has disabled the feature – default device encryption – in order to increase the speed of smartphones and tablets already running Android 5.x.

While that move may please users who aren’t interested in having all their data protected by 128-bit AES encryption (it also definitely pleases the government), other Android users may want to reenable it if privacy and security are concerns. More →

There is plenty to like in Google’s latest major Android release, Lollipop. It’s faster, lighter and more battery efficient than ever before. The biggest in-your-face change found in Android 5.0 was the new look of the operating system, which Google calls “Material Design.”

Material Design brings a sleek and sophisticated look to Android, modernizing the user interface and unifying it at the same time. Developers are still hard at work updating their apps to conform to the principles of Material Design, so it’s still a bit difficult to find the best new apps.

Even before the advent of Google Maps, folks were using programs like MapQuest to print up directions and figure out the shortest route between any two locations. While it’s easy to take mapping apps for granted these days, there’s some interesting mathematical algorithms at work behind the scenes that make it all possible.

Not many people are aware of this, but the computer algorithm that makes mapping programs so convenient dates all the way back to 1956, when a programmer named Edsger W. Dijkstra needed to come up with a solvable problem as a means to showcase the power of a new ARMAC computer. Dijkstra himself is a bit of a computing legend, having received the Turing Award in 1972.

As if the United States Postal Service wasn’t already in deep enough water with the countless online innovations making physical mail obsolete, Google’s new service could make paying your bills as easy as having a Gmail account.

Re/code reports that Google is working on a project called Pony Express that will allow users to view and pay their bills straight from their Gmail accounts, without having to visit those awful websites belonging to utility companies and other service providers. More →

Ahhhhh! Save yourselves! Google is evil! We hear it time and time again; people erupting with concern over Google’s “evil” policies that play it fast and loose with our privacy. And who complains about Google and its evil policies more frequently and much louder than anyone else? Why, it’s Google’s competitors, of course.

Case in point: A new blog post published by one of Cyanogen’s investors on Monday. More →

Google Glass hasn’t exactly been a rousing success. Actually, you might even call it an abysmal failure. While the product undeniably housed incredibly cool and advanced technologies, compelling use cases for the product were never fleshed out. If anything, Google seemed content to just release the product into the wild and leave it to Google Glass explorers to figure out what in the world to do with it.

Even though some Android device makers have already rolled out devices with embedded fingerprint sensors that offer users added security features, Google has yet to make it a core security feature for Android. But Google is still working on its own interesting solutions for temporarily killing the need for a PIN on smartphones, as the company has just added new functionality to Android 5.0 Lollipop that’s not only cool, but also very useful. More →